


Villains That Live in My Head

by bisexualamy



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Depression, Gen, Minor Violence, Nightmares, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-09 21:15:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6923626
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bisexualamy/pseuds/bisexualamy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes even Earth's Mightiest Heroes have trouble sleeping.</p><p>How a few of the Avengers deal with their nightmares.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Villains That Live in My Head

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for the prompt [samantha-momo-barks!](http://samantha-momo-barks.tumblr.com/) I didn't do all the Avengers because I don't feel comfortable writing for all of them. Also, the title comes from "Control" by Halsey.

When she’s awake, Natasha Romanoff is focused, practical, and has a wit sharp enough to cut diamond.  And she’ll gladly stay awake, too.  She’ll keep watch during missions, spend hours flipping through channels at two in the morning, or walk around the hallways of the Avengers Complex, keeping any thoughts to herself.

Because when she closes her eyes she sees the Red Room.

She feels the handcuffs they used to chain her to her bed clink around her wrists.  She hears the gunshots coming from rooms down the hallway, left to wonder if the bullet hit cardboard or flesh.  She sees the men they brought in for target practice, barely decent human beings, but victims in their own right.  She could take down three men blindfolded as they went in for the kill.  She could break the neck of someone twice her size in a single motion.  She was trained, relentlessly, and that training doesn’t leave you.

But in her nightmares she’s not passing test after testing, winning the favor of superiors she only knew by aliases.  In her nightmares, those men grab her and beat her senseless as the powers that be watched in amusement.  Failures had no place gaining her specialized set of skills.  Failures were left to the dogs.

And they never killed her either, not in these nightmares.  They would beat her to the brink of death and then let her go, give her a day to heal, and come back for more blood.  A neverending cycle of tasting death only for it to be taken away.  After a few times, she was begging for any shred of mercy, but these faceless, soulless tormentors supported themselves on her suffering, and they would keep going as long as they wanted.

Natasha is not a noisy sleeper.  You’d never know she was having a nightmare, because even as her heart raced inside of her, her training taught her that restless sleepers get caught.  Eventually, when the nightmare gets to be too much and it finally jolts her awake, she sits and breathes, willing her heart rate back to its normal, steady pace.  Getting worked up over nightmares is pointless, she tells herself.  They aren’t a real threat, just a demon of her imagination, and her mind was something she worked to control.

With enough training, she would get it compliant too.

***

Sam Wilson knows trauma.  He knows it from his patients, and he knows it from himself.  He’s even learned to say it out loud: I have PTSD.  I am dealing with trauma.

There’s a difference between saying it and dealing with it, however.  Sam knows there’s a healthy way to go about things like this, and he does it to the best of his ability, but no one’s perfect.  He knows suppressing memories of Riley falling out of the sky weren’t going to do him any good when it was the only thing he saw on restless nights.  He knew the system, the right way to go about this, the need to address the bitterness and survivor’s guilt he was feeling and just  _ deal with it, _ but he couldn’t.  Not when even thinking about Riley’s girlfriend back home, the family they were going to have, was enough to send him on a spiral.

And now, it was worse.  Now whenever the backs of his eyelids didn’t show Riley, they showed Rhodey.  Rhodey, like him, only involved in that mess of an airport fight because their best friend told them it was the right thing to do, and they’d be damned if they didn’t follow their soldier into battle.  Morality isn’t something to scoff at until it almost gets you killed, and Rhodey and Sam, they knew that.  They were soldiers who’d flown mission after mission, knowing that when they hugged their friends and family that could be the last time they’d see their shining faces, but something about it doesn’t hit you until you see a body dropping like dead weight down to Earth.  And this time, Sam didn’t just feel the guilt.  He knew it was his fault.

At least Rhodey was alive.  That’s what he had to tell himself when he saw both Riley and Rhodey falling down, down, down, perpetually for hour after hour in his nightmares.  It was always the same: Sam was this close to saving them, to grabbing their hands and pulling them to safety, when gravity seemed to take over with ten times the amount of force it should and they slipped away, plummeting into the Earth like a stone into water.  The holes their bodies made kept getting deeper, the speed they fell kept getting faster, and the guilt Sam felt at letting them go kept weighing on him harder.

When his eyes finally take pity on him and open, and he can hear his audible breaths come faster and faster, it’s always the same routine.  Get out of bed, get a glass of water, calm yourself down, and think: it’s not your fault.  Every night when the nightmares came, Sam would recite that like prayer.   _ It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault. _  Then, a sip of water.   _ It’s not your fault. _  A much needed exhale.   _ It’s not your fault. _  And finally, when he began to feel sleepy again, he’d set the glass on the night table next to his bed, and he’d force the last thought in his mind to be,  _ Sam, it’s not your fault. _

***

Getting used to new environments was something that Wanda Maximoff had learned to adapt to.  From the destruction of her childhood home, to her enlistment with Hydra, to finally becoming an Avenger, a change of scene wasn’t enough to send Wanda into a bout of discomfort.

The death of her brother, however?  Now that was a different story.

She never saw him die, and that eats at her.  She was miles away from where he stopped breathing, she couldn’t even be there with him, and that’s what she can’t forgive herself for.  They always did everything together.  They’d become Hydra experiments together, they’d switched sides and joined the Avengers together, and most importantly, they’d sat together for days watching Tony Stark’s shell, waiting for it to go off and take their lives.  Everything they’d done was together, and when the time came, she expected they’d fight and die together.  That was where she had belonged, at his side, but instead she hadn’t listened to her gut and went off without him.  It was made more sense that way.  It was more  _ logical _ for her to leave his side, it was better  _ strategy. _  That’s how she’d justified it to herself, and now those words ate away at her like acid on her flesh.

The moment she’d been hit with his death, the knot in her stomach she had when she felt he was gone, was something she knew would stay with her forever.  They all assumed it was the telekinetic powers that gave her that feeling, but she would’ve known even before Hydra.  All knowing took was being his twin.  That scream, the weakness in her knees, the emptiness she felt, it was nothing short of dying.  Her body went on, it moved, mimicking the act of being alive, but she knew better.  She knew that she couldn’t possibly live beyond her brother.

And now, a night where she doesn’t relive that moment is a rarity.  On the good nights, the feeling of him slipping away causes the same agony she felt fighting on that floating city for a cause “greater than herself.”  She sees herself fall to her knees, shrieking, feeling as if the very heart and soul of who she was had been ripped violently from her body.  On the bad nights, she’s standing there with him.  She sees the bullets ripping through his body, and she’s powerless to stop it.  She can’t run fast enough, or she falls before she can get to him, or Ultron grabs her before she can reach him.  Always, he’s just shy of her grasp before he dies.  Always, she fails to save him.

Sometimes the shock and despair wakes her up.  Sometimes, fearing for her brother’s safety, she shoots off red pulses from her fingertips, and in the real world it causes something to shatter or fall and the noise brings her out of her nightmare.  Whatever temporarily frees her from her burden to experience her brother’s death over and over, it never lasts long.  The nightmare might not be real, but the suffering is.  And soon it becomes too much, so Wanda cries.  She cries for the moments her brother will never have, for the moments she’ll never have with him, and for a loneliness she never thought she’d have to experience.  She cries because she doesn’t know what else to do to ease the pain.  And finally, she cries away her energy until she falls back asleep.

***

Steve Rogers threw away his chance for a lot of things.  He threw away his chance for a normal life when he became Captain America.  He threw away his chance with Peggy Carter when he crashed into ocean, frozen in ice for seventy years.  He threw away a return to normalcy when he joined SHIELD and let Nick Fury on mission after mission to keep the world safe.  And, he threw away his chance to continue being an Avenger when he wouldn’t sign The Sokovia Accords and beat Tony Stark senseless.  Steve Rogers would never be able to undo any of those decisions, but he didn’t care.  Not if it meant never throwing away his chance to start over with Bucky.

Steve had lost everything.  He’d lost the city he knew (because sure, Brooklyn may still exist, but it definitely didn’t  _ feel _ the same), the Commandos, Peggy, hell, it was a whole different  _ century _ .  The life he thought he’d have when he was a teen was gone, along with the world he knew.  Any chance of getting that back was a fantasy.  But, a sliver of it still lived in Bucky.  The first time he saw him, when he realized on that bridge that he was alive, Steve knew he couldn’t let it go.  He would’ve given anything to have a piece of his old life back, no matter how small, but to get Bucky back, now that was a miracle.

Bucky wasn’t totally himself.  How could he be?  He’d been an agent of Hydra, brainwashed for decades, and on the run for months.  The amount of crimes he’d committed (and who he’d even killed) was a number Steve could only imagine, and he knew better than to ask.  As much as he wanted to help Bucky fight all his battles, the war raging inside his best friend’s mind was something he could only provide support for.  Still, the idea that now Bucky could heal, that he and Steve could start a new life in a world falling apart, was something Steve liked more than he cared to admit.  He never needed the Avengers; he only needed his best friend.

Even so, when Steve closes his eyes, when he and Bucky feel like they can stop running for a few hours and he goes to sleep after his watch, it doesn’t matter that Bucky is back.  All Steve sees is that train in the mountains, and his best friend falling to his death.  Because, in a sense, Bucky still died that day.  His life as James Buchanan Barnes was over the second Hydra decided to make him the Winter Soldier.  And Steve couldn’t save him from that fate.

In his nightmares, Bucky falls again and again in ten different ways.  Sometimes he’s shot and falls.  Sometimes he slips, grabs Steve, but can’t hold on.  And sometimes, the worst times, he’s holding on but Steve can’t keep his grip.  All of his Captain America strength melts away, and suddenly he’s skinny, sickly Steve Rogers who can barely hold a heavy backpack, let alone the body of his best friend.  There are other nightmares, too.  Nightmares of the Winter Soldier trying to fight him.  When Steve refuses and tries to reason with Bucky he can’t get through his best friend’s programming, and the Winter Soldier kills him easily to complete his mission.  That’s when he’s terrified and heartbroken.

He has terrible memories of fighting in the War, of soldiers dying around him, but somehow, the only thing that can wake him up in cold sweats is the idea of Bucky dying again.  He’s never been a calm sleeper, tossing and turning since he was young, so Bucky’s used to hearing him mutter and kick the blankets off and thinks nothing of it.  Steve knows better, though.  Steve knows the turning and muttering is his desperate attempt to prevent a past that’s already happened.

When he wakes up, after he lets out a long breath and realizes what’s past and what’s present, he goes to find Bucky.  Facing his demons is something he’s not interested in, not when his biggest fear is that Bucky is gone.  Sitting with his best friend, sometimes speaking and sometimes not saying anything, is enough to ease his fears.  Bucky may not be the same man from his childhood, but he’s still Bucky.  He’s still the best part of Steve’s life.

***

Tony Stark likes to say that the death of his parents doesn’t bother him anymore.  Sure, it’s sad.  He’ll talk about it in interviews and say how deeply it affected his early adulthood.  He’ll even admit that he still affects him, that it might’ve had a deeper effect than he initially expected.  Occasionally, if he’s feeling bold, he’ll take a semi-private moment to let it really sink in.  But, it’s still an act.

In reality, however Tony dealt with the death of his parents in the past has no bearing on how he deals with it now.  Now that he knows they were murdered by Hydra.  By Bucky.  He could resent Steve Rogers all he wanted for picking the murderer’s side over his, for keeping this secret from Tony when he’d known for months, but it wouldn’t bring his parents back.  And it would never change what Bucky did.

He’d lost the Avengers.  He’d lost JARVIS.  He’d lost Pepper.  He’d lost everything in his life, but he was going to keep it together.  He was going to walk out into the world and prove that he could still be okay.  But, when he goes to sleep at night, he can’t hide from his own mind.  In his nightmares he sees his parents driving down that forest road, watching from some indiscernible location.  He tries to shout out to them, to warn them that they were about to die, but somehow the words can’t leave his throat before it was too late.  Bucky comes, driving on his motorcycle, and before his eyes Tony Stark sees his mother shot and his father’s head slammed in a car door, begging to live.  Sure, his father hadn’t been the best person.  He was responsible for a lot of damage and heartache.  But he hadn’t deserved to die brutally in a staged car accident, never to have his murder investigated or given a second thought.

Sometimes, however, it’s worse.  Sometimes he’s in the car with his parents, trying to warn them of what he knows to be coming before the car spins out of control and Bucky comes in for the kill.  In those nightmares he dies along with them, trying to reason with the Winter Soldier before death, with Steve Rogers nowhere to be found.  Of course Steve didn’t think Bucky was a criminal.  He’d been in the ice while Bucky was doing the majority of his damage.  Where was he when Tony’s parents died?  Where was he when JFK died?  Iced, free of responsibility, but still willing to stick his all-American nose into matters that didn’t need his input.

He never likes to go to sleep after waking up from one of these nightmares, not wanting to take the risk of slipping right back into the scene he just escaped.  Instead, he goes and makes himself an Italian cappuccino, or just an espresso if he’s feeling direct, and sits in his kitchen trying to think of anything but his parents.  The caffeine is usually enough to keep him awake, but with his mind running so quickly, it frequently returns to thoughts he’d rather not deal with.  He knows that bitterness isn’t going to solve anything as well as he knows that burying his emotions isn’t going to make him feel better, but he’s damn well going to try.  Nightmares could only get to him if he let them.


End file.
